"Anticlimax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... approach some conception of it through obscure channels of intuition. Their treatment by the prison officials was not ordinarily severe; even a warden or a guard could feel that clubbing and dark-celling would be a kind of anticlimax for a man sentenced for life. Some of them—usually negroes—would be given easy jobs, and not held too strictly to the petty regulations whose special object is to humiliate the ordinary prisoner, under guise of disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and to use none but the well-tried way. For example, we overwork the twin principles of thought-surprise and thought-concentration, and in the effort to produce dramatic effect, we sometimes achieve only an anticlimax. Using the techniques of the advertising world, the military instructor puts his exhibits behind a screen, in order to buildup anticipation, and at the appropriate moment he yanks the cover off. This is perfectly effective, in some instances. But it becomes a reductio ad absurdum ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Jefferson growled, "why somebody doesn't badger me to go to church!" Indignant because Fran had fled the pleasing fields of his interested vision, he paused, as if to invite antagonism; but all avoided the anticlimax. ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... had begun at the other end,—landed at Shanghai, for instance, and worked our way northward,—we should probably have been enthusiastic over the lesser towns. But we began at the top; and when you have seen the best there is, everything else is anticlimax. ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... Mss. of the poem, in which the "gods" proved to be "birds" long before he changed them. The reader may ask, what is there to choose between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with "gods" would be to make an anticlimax of the close. Lovelace led from birds and fishes to winds, and ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... scene. At last, those who had been agitating so long for self-government had the boon apparently within their grasp. In their eyes it was a great occasion—the true commencement of national life in the Colony. The irony of fate, or the perversity of man, turned it into a curious anticlimax. The Parliament, indeed, duly assembled. But it dispersed after weeks of ineffectual wrangling and intrigue, amid scenes which were discreditable and are still ridiculous. Those who had drawn up the constitution had forgotten that Government, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... tame execution of the terrible decree, providing a sorry anticlimax to its noisy proclamation, the German press called for a policy of no compromise with the United States. The "Berliner Tageblatt" announced that Germany intended to wage a ruthless U-boat war against her enemies, whatever the American attitude might be. Apparently the German people believed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... It may seem an anticlimax to trace the color woodcut from Jackson to Baxter, and finally to chromolithography, but it is not irrelevant. Although spurned by the better artists, color had too popular an appeal to be ignored. It was inescapable that Jackson's successful technical procedures should finally be adopted ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... head, Miss Olive, distinctly on the head," he assured her, with a bow and smile so suave as to be devoid of meaning. "Really," and Olive felt as if she were a young child and he were offering her a stick of candy; "it was a very smart little tap. Yes, as you say, a Mamie is an anticlimax to one's best endeavours. Now, if all the ladies," Olive had a momentary longing to hurl a plate in his unctuous direction; "only were blessed with names like yours, we poor novelists would never be devoid of sources for ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... you think I would risk an anticlimax? [In an intense whisper.] To-night! [Louder.] To-night? [He hesitates a little longer—then bows in assent, stiffly and coldly. She gives an ardent sigh.] Ah—! [He retreats a step or two. She draws herself up with dignity.] ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... excursions into it, and told me that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed, with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... juvenility of Mildred:—a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of King Victor's death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent. More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer, she, like the typical young Miss Anglaise of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect, "What, you've murdered my lover! Well, tell me all. Pardon? Oh, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... him up after the others had bade good night. He always enjoyed the anticlimax of pleasure, and the day had been a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Theydon smiled at the anticlimax. A trivial mystery had developed along strictly orthodox lines. A rather good-looking and distinctly well-dressed lady, a Mrs. Lester, occupied No. 17. She lived alone, too, he believed. At any rate, he had never seen any other person, except an ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy |
